Maphead: This Island Went Back in Time to Get First Dibs on the New Year

Two weeks ago, we all saw the dawn of a brand new year. But Millennium Island is lucky enough to see the new year first, every single year. Though perhaps "lucky" isn't the right word, as it's not exactly an accident of geography...

Two weeks ago, we all saw the dawn of a brand new year. But there's one country in the world lucky enough to be the first to see the new year, every single year. Though perhaps "lucky" isn't the right word—because it's not exactly an accident of geography. As the International Date Line—the point at which each new day begins—is an entirely man-made construction, it’s possible to game the system. And in 2000, a country did just that, traveling back in a time a full day just to get first dibs on New Year’s Day. Let’s visit the uninhabited South Pacific atoll of Carolina, aka “Millennium Island.”

The International Date Line is one of the oddest side effects of the 24-time-zone system that governs the world’s clocks. Fly west around the world and the time magically gets an hour earlier every time you travel about 15 degrees of longitude. But, as a moment’s thought will reveal, it can’t just keep getting earlier forever, into yesterday, and then the day before yesterday. You can’t time-travel back to the dinosaurs just by flying west long enough. At some point, there has to be a line where 7 a.m. on Monday becomes 6 a.m. …but on Tuesday. That’s the International Date Line, and to cut down on confusion, it zigzags all over the place to avoid land: Alaska, Samoa, New Zealand, and so on.

But one country that still straddled the line was the South Pacific republic of Kiribati (pronounced “KIR-ee-boss,” the local pronunciation of the archipelago’s colonial name, the Gilbert Islands). The eastern islands of Kiribati are on the east side of the date line, so it’s actually 23 hours earlier there, a different day altogether. In 2000, Kiribati’s president Teburoro Tito decided to move his entire country into the same time zone. Not-at-all-coincidentally, this would make Caroline Atoll the first speck of the Pacific to see the first sunrise of the 2000s. Tito renamed the atoll “Millennium Island” and prepared for a massive New Year’s celebration there to draw in tourists and TV viewers worldwide.

Is this legal? Yes, international law allows countries to time-travel all they want in order to choose their own time zone. In 2011, the country of Samoa decided to skip December 30 altogether, so they could jump west across the date line and observe the same business week as their Asian and Australian trade partners.

The irony is that, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory, Kiribati’s publicity stunt did not make it home to the first January 1 sunrise of the new millennium. Consider: in Antarctica in January, the sun is up all the time. But at the coast, it does dip briefly below the horizon before reappearing. That happens just five minutes after midnight every January 1 on the headland between Dibble Glacier and Victor Bay. An uninhabited coastline in Antarctica has Kiribati beat by over half an hour!